I have this memory, stronger in impression than detail, of hiking somewhere, likely in the Appalachians, after hours, after days of winding along the thread of a trail, the only human intervention, negotiating endurance and fatigue, working to find a rhythm through thick growth on either side beneath a cover of trees that blocked further sight, rising, descending on switchbacks along a ridge, only occasionally reaching a clearing where I could look out and see the rolling hills, mountains that stretched endlessly only to lose sight again at the next turn, rising, descending again, losing in the rhythm of climbing, in the motion of my thoughts any thought of destination that night, of any clear direction, of any ambition, of any larger self, instead absorbing the presence around me, indeterminate from my point of view but which had its own determination, its own motions, slower, imperceptible, a timeline that diminished me—I came upon in a clearing a stone building, or brick, its windows open, its roof gone but otherwise intact, likely a house, but its function was uncertain now, its use transcended by years of abandon, or made irrelevant, and I stopped and felt a shift, was moved to some understanding that had the force of revelation but not its speed, was profound but without depth, without extension, yet that still took me to a broader reflection that has stayed with me ever since. This was some fifty years ago.
Danish artist Per Kirkeby, who studied geology in college, talks of his experience on a field trip in southern Sweden where the class explored a stone quarry, then passed a Romanesque church nearby, isolated, abandoned, in decline.
The structure built by nature had been uncovered by people; the church built by men, however, had been gradually taken over by nature. As time went on. Where is the border between one and the other way to organize matter? For a brief moment I saw geology as a world view.
In a glimpse I saw geology as a philosophy, a vision extending far beyond any technocratic discipline. A huge stream of energy and materials, which now and then converges in crystalline structures, a mountain, a church, a brief moment, a breath, a morning mist over the ever-flowing river. The mountain-building energies were no less cultural than the energies of the church-builders. I saw the geologist’s curiosity, could not stop at the mountain and before the church. It was a dizzying feeling.
Revealed, a different way not just of seeing himself in the world, but living in it. Yet he only had a glimpse, and when he returned home he realized his reaction was just that, a feeling and not an insight. In what sense are the forces that made mountains cultural? Where is the border between the energies that built churches and those that build mountains? What is their relationship? Where is insight, what to make of feeling? He doesn’t answer, only raises the questions. The experience influenced his later art, where he raises them again, resisting answers, yet, viewing his work we feel a shift, perhaps wonder what kinds of answers we expect.
His paintings bring geological strata to mind, in fact resemble them, but they are not an attempt to represent them, rather reflect a process of interaction, of an artist negotiating perceived forces in nature, their material facts, the artist’s experience of self, his thoughts, his feelings, the material experience of paint, recent art, past art, history itself, where it is difficult if not impossible to mark clear borders, define relationships, rather all exist in uneasy stress and overlapping.
I think of my paintings as a summation of structures. A depositing of thin, thin layers. Only in utmost desperation does a thick layer occur. In principle, an endless process of sedimentation. But it is striking that even when a new layer has a quite different motif and color, it is the underlying structure that comes through. It rubs off. And this is the condition of the appearance of rock at the point in time at which sedimentation for some reason is interrupted, it rises above the water and is exposed, dependent upon the first grain, the first pigment. This, the interruption, is a difficult issue. Geological upheaval is a display. Force, self-inflicted and external. But also a process with its own terminal energy. It is often painful, unrefined, a desire to have it over and done with. It often gives rise to rash terminations that truly resemble solutions, but which are often loops of the most desperate and despairing conflicts within the self-inflicted restriction of the surface.
Nature is not settled, but has its own energies that result in unexpected upheavals, or unexpected to us, for us rash and troubling. But Kirkeby touches other internal tensions in this context, with their own energies, as well as, materially before him, before us, those that exert themselves within the borders of the frame, the accumulation and shifts and strains of layered paint, their structure, their failure to find it in some settled way, reach clear summation. What is painful and unrefined is not nature but the process of painting itself, and the strain comes from the desire to complete a painting, which leads to rash conclusions and dubious solutions the painting resists, as does his perception of nature. His work, however, is not rash or traumatic, rather exhibits a balance of conflict and composure that settles us to some degree without letting us rest.
We’re not going to find a good way to come to terms with his work in words. Take a long hike in the mountains, let your thoughts go, put thoughts of a purpose, of an end, of destination on a tether, then let in all that you experience within, without, then look at the painting and you’ll get a sense of what it expresses, necessarily imperfectly captures.
I don’t know if the red stripe figures a manmade structure or not. But in Kirkeby’s Plan (2009), at the top, and his other brick sculptures, we are given one, set in a natural environment. With the structure, a notion of structure, in the abstract, expressed in another medium that raises other questions of meaning and relationship.
I was constantly aware of and distressed by what was so intensely banal about “the system,” but I needed the naiveté. With it I could for instance make a blue color usable: pure and impure, sky and blue at random. And with it I could underpin my inclinations towards brick: brick and its rules, and whatever else is a part of the ancient craft, was pure structure that accommodated what was called conceptual ideas.
Plan resembles a modest two-story cabin in the mountains, or a ruin of one, but only superficially, from a glance. The structure is intact and structurally quite sound, and despite the absence of doors and glazing is otherwise complete, rather the absence defines the completion, the conception, though the brick will show age as the years pass. Circle around it and our sense of its possible type and function as well as its size and structure changes.
Against practice and expectation, the second floor is significantly taller. The protruding mass, on the right here, might be read as a chimney. The indentation beside it, however, refers to nothing functionally, though serves to add a negative accent that parallels the “chimney’s” height and defines another vertical mass beside it, all contrasting with the structure’s horizontal character and stabilizing it.
From one corner, the structure is wide and open. From the next it is closed, massive, and narrower.
Keep circling, and we find the “chimney” and vertical slot repeated on the next side, though in reverse location, in fact on all sides. We lose all sense of major or secondary entry, and less and less it looks like any house we know.
If we go inside, we won’t find the layout of a familiar program for domestic life, especially in that central square. Inside or out, it is difficult to define or conceive the whole structure from our ground experience. Essentially it is two overlapping squares, with distinctive variations that depart from the plan, but only from overhead or from a floor plan can we easily grasp the structure and understand its symmetries and complexity.
It is pure structure, and as such, in the abstract, suggests a concept, maybe of living in structures, or one that challenges conventional notions.
With the concept, rules for the system, the orderly laying of bricks, thousands of them, the repetitive gesture of laying them, row by row, for hours, days, weeks, a ritual that requires craft and patience, a human hand, needs focus on an individual element and its joints. Each brick has a unique volume, slight variation from the predetermined, essential size, and its own rough texture, variation of tactile experience, and varying shades of a color that blend life and matter, blood and mud, each, when combined with the rest, has to be aligned in rows as the structure slowly rises within the guiding plan. A brick structure is a monument to human effort.
And conversely brick was full of associations and references. References to the great, historically deep architecture, with ruins and other scenery, drifting fog, moonlight. And for me full of associations to childhood experiences in the shadow of enormous chunks of Gothic brick.
Brick also takes us to our culture, to our past, to centuries, millennia of similar efforts, some of which still stand. The slight arches over the openings, larger than structurally needed, emphatic, take us back to Roman times.
Also Kirkeby’s construction brings us to a specific place, a flat meadow in Spain, before the Pyrenees,
near the small village of Plan and, above, the even smaller village of San Juan de Plan. It forms a structural nexus at this spot that joins people, their settled life, their history, and nature without making connections, drawing any conclusions.
Its title, Plan, is multiple in suggestion, or ambiguous. Plan, derived from plano, flat, level, refers to a plain, from which the villages take their names, can also mean plan as a schema, an idea. The work is also referred to as Cabañera de la montaña—I’m not clear if this is Kirkeby’s designation or the site has that name, though likely it has the history. Cabañera is the feminine of cabañero, a herdsman, who once tended livestock from a hut. In Aragon cabañera also once referred to paths for moving sheep and cattle. Again, a history. So Plan brings together people, material facts, historical references, and immaterial ideas—a past, distant, remembered, still present; the people who once lived and still live in the villages; the drovers who once herded, a pathway for their livelihood and their structure, their hut; and a present structure, Kirkeby’s work itself, which might be a kind of pathway between people and the natural world.
Plan, with its red brick and flat top, doesn’t reference the architecture of the villages, pitched roofs, stone and plaster, so in this respect stands out. It is modern, though still reminds us of past, even ancient construction elsewhere. If Plan represents a concept, it is highly, wholly abstract, at best the idea of an idea. It might suggest the symbol of infinity, but that takes us nowhere, only in and out of a figure without end. It tells us nothing, except that we have ideas, perhaps run around endlessly in circles, perhaps run a course where hope springs eternal in our hearts. Its complexity might reference the complexity of nature, but the building’s design is highly regulated and contained, separate from the sharp, idiosyncratic outcrops of rock, abrupt, the ranging growth, calming, the ever changing sky, abrupt one moment, calming the next. What it does not do is lie within a Cartesian grid and project universal order. From any point view, whether we look at Plan from the villages or look out from within the structure to the villages, to distant mountains, we reach no conclusions about ourselves, about the world, about our place in the world, about any kind of order.
Yet all these things exist and have existed for some time and still are present, and they have been visibly implied and collectively brought together in a structure that encourages us to contemplate time present, time past, the time of nature, immediate and everywhere present, distant, unapproachable, on a scale beyond our comprehension. We won’t be able to place ourselves securely on a timeline, but here we are. Plan interrupts, gives pause, disrupts our settled thoughts, makes us doubt, but it is an unassuming structure that does not overwhelm us or intrude greatly on the setting. Yet it sets a larger perspective without resolving it, moving us to a profound yet quiet silence.
I don’t know what thoughts I had when I came upon the cabin in the Appalachians, if that is what and where it was, whether I constructed narratives of the encroachment of civilization, or of rural decline, or of urban, or of some local disaster, a fire, a family on hard times, whether I contemplated some retreat from the trials of my youthful years, from the troubles for all of us at time. All those memories are gone, irretrievable. All that remains is an impression that has been durable for over fifty years. When I think about the cabin now and look at Plan I have no desire to create stories about either or wrap them in neat conclusions, or enclose myself in structural comfort, or escape the world, or give myself to abandon, or read present stress into them, nor wish to project utopias or dystopias, rather feel the need ground myself in what is around me without losing the desire to build, learn to live with questions and disturbance, and take the long view. Given our times, we need it.
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Notes
See also:
Non-Monument #6: Urban (Kirkeby)
The model is close, though at this scale I had to make compromises. I could, in fact, have made a much larger model following the floor plan above and it would have been nearly exact, though it would have taken thousands more pieces.
Kirkeby needs more attention. I’m not finding much online or in books.
The drawing of the ground floor plan and the photograph before the Pyrenees, Andres Ferrer, from Architecture Today. I also used the photograph as backdrop in my first image. Note I shifted orientation of the model.
Painting, Untitled, 1998, from Day of the Artist.
Photograph before San Juan de Plan from Creaciones Contemporáneas.
All Kirkeby quotations from Writings on Art, Per Kirkeby, Spring Publications, edited by Asger Schnack, translated by Martin Aitken.
Also see Torsten Karlsson, Per Kirkeby skulpturer. The site has many photos of his other work, including his brick sculptures, along with essays, parts of which have been translated into English.
Margaret Talbot, “Denmark Is Sick of Being Bullied by Trump,” The New Yorker, discusses the mood in Denmark today and gives some history and background on their relationship with Greenland.